Posts tagged MGM

Judging by the number of clicks registered by last week’s blogs about Judy Garland — Judy’s PeakYears publishedon Friday and Wednesday’s Star of the Week — Or Maybe Star of the Century — there is certainly a great deal of continued enthusiasm for and interest about this great star.

And, today, to keep things going, we thought we’d come up with an impromptu pop quiz about Judy to see just how much you really do know about her. We’ve tried to make the questions as off the wall as possible since we’ve covered most of the Garland basics in previous blogs.

So let’s have some fun. Here we go:

Question: Can you name the producer as well as the co-star of MGM’s Babes InArms, one of Judy’s earliest movie musicals made in 1939? Was it a hit when it first came out?

Question: TV’s renowned Ed Sullivan, whose CBS variety show introduced the Beatles to mainstream America, used to beef about Garland’s appearances on a rival tv program. Who hosted that program, and what did Garland do to so unsettle the great tv MC?

Question: Which physical “flaw” almost derailed the very young Garland’s career before it even started? 1) hirsute eyebrows; 2) acne; 3) a gap between her front teeth; or 4) a persistent lisp?

Question: Can you identify Garland’s five husbands in the order that she married them?

Question: How old was Garland when she died? 1) 51; 2) 49; 3) 47 ; or 4) 55.

Question: Garland won the role of Vicki Lester (Mrs. Norman Maine) in 1954’s A Star IsBorn because 1) her talent and suitability for the role was obvious; 2) because she was close to director George Cukor; 3) because she agreed to perform at the birthday party of Jack Warner’s daughter; or 4) because she slept with her powerful costar James Mason.

Question: Which of the following did NOT have an affair with the young Judy? 1) SpencerTracy; 2) Artie Shaw; 3) Tyrone Power; 4) Orson Welles or 5) Van Heflin.

Question: The adultGarland was certainly no amazon but just how tall was she, anyway? 1) 5-foot-nine; 2) 4-foot-11; 3) 5-foot-2; or 4) six feet?

Question: Given her troubled life, we’d be interested to know how many times Garland attempted suicide? 1) Twice; 2) four times; 3) as many as seven times; 4) never.

Question: Which one of the following said about Judy that “there wasn’t a thing that gal couldn’t do, except look after herself?” 1) Mickey Rooney; 2) Charles Bickford; 3) Bing Crosby or 4) Gene Kelly?

The morning of Jan. 10, 1942, in the small town of Ballard deep in California’s Santa Ynez Mountains, Ava Gardner wed the first of her three husbands, Mickey Rooney.

The bride, the first of Rooney’s eight wives, was a 19-year-old virgin not long off a low-rent tobacco farm in North Carolina. At 21, he was MGM’s biggest star — bigger, even, than Clark Gable.

The remote location of the ceremony was deliberate as was the fact that the wedding party was kept to a minimum. MGM boss Louis B. Mayer worried that marriage might dent Rooney’s box office power among love struck adolescent girls. The less publicity the better.

His MGM star Esther Williams wondered about the very same thing. She wrote in her autobiography — The Million Dollar Mermaid, coauthored by Digby Diehl — that she found Ava’s marriage to the diminutive Rooney (all of 5-feet-2-inches tall) “absolutely unimaginable, at least from a physical point of view.” For the record, Ava stood four inches taller than Rooney, without heels.

Since we’ve unearthed new information about the Ava-Mick marriage, we thought we’d revisit the topic and tell you once and for all about what drew the blushing bride to been-around-the-block husband.

As we’ve previously noted, Ava explained in her newly published Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, coauthored by Peter Evans (Simon & Schuster) that when she first met Rooney, Ava was put off by his shortness. But there was definitely something appealing about him. He had thick, red-blond wavy hair, crinkly Irish green eyes and a grin that was…well, it definitely wasn’t innocent, honey, I can tell that!

It certainly wasn’t. By the time he married Ava, the Mick had accumulated a considerable amount of sexual experience, which came in handy on their marriage’s opening night. It was a perfect wedding night, Ava told coauthor Evans, despite her shyness.

But I caught on quickly. Very quickly. I enjoyed the whole thing thoroughly. Mickey was tender, actually he was sweet. He couldn’t have been a better first lover for a lady. He’d been around quite a bit, of course — and marriage didn’t stop him for very long either.

Whatever his addictions to gambling at race tracks, golf, drinking, night club hopping and hamming it up for his buddies, Rooney felt about Ava as she did about him. Mick and I were crazy in love although we were still almost strangers to each other when we married.

As she put it, we were two young kids having a whale of a time…We were discovering new things about each other all the time…Like he was athletic in the sack, and I was pretty verbal, and we were both very, very loud.

Sex was the the basis of the union. The problem was his infidelity. Hospitalized for a spell after an appendectomy, Ava returned to the couple’s apartment to discover evidence that Mick had been screwing somebody in our bed…That ain’t a very nice thing for a nineteen-year-old bride, quite pretty too, to discover.

There had, in fact, been quite a bit of philandering around on his part. His “little black book” was filled with the numbers of willing female partners. He was just a lecherous sod who loved getting his rocks off, is how Ava put it.

Despite being “madly in love,” Ava said she decided to end the marriage. By January 15,1943 — one year and five days after their nuptials — the couple formally separated. By the following May, the marriage was over.

But after the separation and before the final divorce decree, Gardner and Rooney continued on intimate terms. After all, we were still married and the sex was legal — and still pretty good, thank God. There was no point in giving that up just because we were semi-detached.

Towards the end of his life, George Sanders was hell to interview. In a late Sixties exchange with critic Rex Reed, he was asked about which of his leading ladies he most enjoyed working with.

Was Bette Davis, his costar in 1950’s All About Eve (which won the dyspeptic Sanders a best supporting actor Oscar) his favorite? His crisp answer: No.

Making it clear that he found Reed’s query inane and more than slightly annoying, Sanders finally responded with, Oh, all right — Lucille Ball! Lucille Ball was my favorite. (He couldn’t remember which picture they made together; it was Lured, a 1947 United Artists crime mystery directed by Douglas Sirk, which costars Charles Coburn and BorisKarloff.)

It’s telling that while the movie’s title escaped him, Sanders easily recalled that Ball was nothing if not a winning personality. Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, to go on record today that, like Sanders, we equally enjoy Lucille Ball — as a movie actress as well as a TV star.

The enormous success of the I Love Lucy tube series (originally run on CBS from 1951 to 1957) has obscured Lucy’s career — as what she termed “a second-rate” movie star –from 1933 when she first came to Hollywood to take a chorus girl part in producer Samuel Goldwyn’s Roman Scandals starring Eddie Cantor to 1940 when she first met future husband Desi Arnaz on the set of RKO’s Too Many Girls.

Her seven year stint at RKO was most pleasurable for Lucille since I’ve always been a family person, and I adopted R.K.O. as my studio family. She was also earning some serious money at the time — about $1,000 a week and making three or four pictures a year throughout the 1930s. By 1940, she had appeared in some 50 to 60 titles.

As Joe has previously written, one picture in 1942 stands out among Lucille’s movie appearances. RKO’s The Big Street is a minor classic film, only notable today because of Ball’s dramatic performance as a been-around-the-block night club singer.

It’s a fanciful tale by Damon Runyon, who also produced the film. Lucille by this time had given some good comedy performances (Stage Door, Room Service, etc.) as well as some good dramatic performances (Five Came Back, Dance, Girl, Dance).

Shewas even auditioned by Orson Welles (an occasional dating partner) for the role of Charles Foster Kane’s opera-singing second wife in 1941’s Citizen Kane. Her competition included Joan Crawford and Anne Baxter. The part went, of course, to Dorothy Comingore

For the male lead in The Big Street, Runyon eventually signed Henry Fonda, who was fulfilling a contract obligation to the studio. Ball and Fonda — another actor charmed by Lucille — had had a fling a few years back, and supposedly Desi Arnaz, Ball’s new husband was jealous and often visited the set to check up on his wife.

The Big Street was well received critically but just ok at the box office. However, MGM, the most successful studio back then, finally saw her potential and bought her contract from RKO. It seemed as if Lucille had finally made the big time.

Metro glamorized her, and starred her in two big Technicolor musicals. But within two years she was back to playing supporting roles. She was Hepburn’s pal in 1945’s Without Love and a year later, was second lead to Esther Williams in Easy to Wed.

Why then was The Big Street a BREAKTHROUGH film for Lucille Ball? Because it brought her to the attention of MGM and changed the direction of her career.

At MGM Lucille Ball became the flaming redhead she is remembered as today. The Lucy most people know — and is still celebrated with an annual ‘Lucy Fest’ in her hometown of Jamestown, New York —was born with her move from RKO to MGM.

While on a visit to Las Vegas after Liberace died of AIDS in 1987 — he kept both his disease and sexual orientation a secret to the end — Frank discovered that there was actually a museum up and running dedicated to the master. Nothing elaborate, it was located on the second level of a strip mall facing a nearby highway.

Curious, Frank took a look. On display were various pianos and an array of the amazing costumes Liberace wore on his tv shows. It was all too much, and Frank started to laugh out loud.

Suddenly there appeared a stern-looking woman, who apparently managed the facility, shushing him, and admonishing that the pieces on display (as well as the entertainer who inspired them) were NOT subjects of levity. Frank agreed to mind his manners, and reverently concluded his visit to the Liberace museum.

Ok, that wasn’t so bad. But let’s get to our quiz of the day. Yes, that is Susan Hayward pictured above right, getting chummy with the ever lovable Liberace, and that other woman — our star of the week.

Do you know who she is?

Hint: if you don’t you’ll be skating on thin ice.

Last week we featured Paulette Goddard, pictured below with Louis B. Mayer and director George Cukor. Several of our long time readers identified Paulette right away.

Cukor was responsible for directing Paulette in one of her best roles, as Miriam Aarons in MGM’s 1939 hit, The Women.

Fans of Fifties MGM movies will immediately identify the distinguished-looking Calhern from his prominent portrayals of some very prominent historical figures — among them, Julius Caesar in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ 1953 handling of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar;and justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in John Sturges 1950 drama, The Magnificent Yankee (which won Calhern an best actor Oscar nomination).

In many ways, Calhern was a perfect MGM actor. Having started his career in silents in 1921,the actor had by the Fifties matured into roles of seasoned, dignified authority, perfect as a corporate businessman or professional. He carried the air of an aristocrat.

But we appreciate Calhern most for one role as a less-than-distinguished protagonist — as the criminal gang’s criminal fence-lawyer (Alonzo D. Emmerich) in John Huston’s 1950 noir classic The Asphalt Jungle, the tale of a bungled jewel robbery by an ex-con and a band of low-level criminals.

Huston later wrote in his autobiography, An Open Book, that one of the lines Calhern speaks expresses the theme of the film: Crime is only a left handed form of human endeavor. The director notes that Asphalt included a number of virtuoso performances, and none was more notable, in our view, than Calhern’s.

Huston also noted in his memoir that Asphalt was, of course, where Marilyn Monroe got her start. She plays Calhern’s young, wide-eyed mistress intrigued with jewels and exotic vacations. In our book, she is terrific in the part and every bit Calhern’s match.

Interestingly, although a fan of Calhern’s, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer was no fan of The Asphalt Jungle. The picture, he said, is full of nasty, ugly people doing nasty, ugly things. I won’t walk across the room to see something like that.

What makes Calhern’s performance stand out is the way in which he captures the melancholy corruption of the character he plays — the respectable-appearing solicitor charged with fencing the precious jewels heisted from a safe by the criminal gang. The actor perfectly captures the sad ambiguity underneath his character’s hapless predicament caught between mounting bills, an ailing wife and a gorgeous but materially demanding mistress.

Calhern lifts the role into an almost philosophical statement. It’s my whole way of life, his character bemoans. Every time I turn around it cost thousands of dollars. I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to get out from under.

Calhern’s handling of the role is not just one of the finest performances in film noir but one of the finest on film anywhere. The actor died of a heart attack while filming 1956’s TheTeahouse of the August Moon in Tokyo, Japan. (Paul Ford took over his role.) Calhern was 61.

She was a star on the Opera stages of Europe. Composers Franz Lehar, Oscar Straus, and Fritz Kreisler wrote works for her. She then made dozens of films in five languages before she married Polish tenor Jan Kiepura and came to America with him. He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in N. Y. in 1938.

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys here to note that we started the week with a story about Opera stars in films, so we thought we’d end the week with a bit of information about one of the longest Opera/Operetta/Film careers ever.

Marta Eggerth (above), still with us, will be 101 on April 17th.

Although a couple of her European films had been released in the States, it wasn’t until MGM signed her in the early 40s and co-starred her in two of Judy Garland’s films that she became familiar to American audiences.

After her roles in For Me and My Gal and Presenting Lily Mars, Eggerth returned to the stage.

Joe had the pleasure of meeting Marta Eggerth back in the 1980s when she was trying to help her son, Jan Kiepura Jr. launch his singing career. Her other son, Marjan Kiepura, is a concert pianist.

At the time Marta told Joe she had left Hollywood and returned to New York because the separations from her husband were too long. They decided they wanted to work together.

During World War II she and her husband starred on Broadway in a revival of TheMerry Widow which ran on Broadway and in touring companies for over 2000 performances.

After the war ended the couple returned to Europe and made several more films. They continued their careers in concert, and although she stopped singing for a few years after Kiepura’s death in 1966, by the 70s she’d returned to acting and singing.

Even in her late 80s she was on stage in London and back in Vienna at the Vienna State Opera. She performed concerts with interviews at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006 at the age of 94. And she has never “officially” retired.

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here today to take a look at two of classic Hollywood’s most powerful men that you probably have never heard of.

One who has, at least a little bit, is regular reader Mike Sheridan, who emailed following last week’s blog about renowned Hollywood mobster Mickey Cohen, the subject of the current Gangster Squad movie from Warner Bros. Writes Mike:

Just as big a thug (as Cohen) but with LONGEVITY and probably more power was the very famous EDDIE MANNIX. Can you tell us about him? He literally was L.B.(Mayer’s) strong arm.

Right you are, Mike. The elder half of the Mannix-Strickling duo (reads like the billing of a vaudeville act) was indeed the tougher of the two. Mannix (pictured above) has been described as a New Jersey bricklayer whose closest friends were mobsters.

Howard Strickling, five years younger,was an ingratiating smoothie whose chief mission in life seemed to be kissing the derriere of MGM boss Louis B. Mayer. Mannix was the most powerful of the two mostly because he unstintingly undertook the dirtiest assignments Mayer doled out to him. But both men were most forceful when they worked together.

Although very different as individuals — they rarely socialized off the lot — they were quite a team. For more than four decades they were almost inseparable during working hours and, most especially, when problems arose involving MGM’s movie star charges.

Author E.J. Fleming’s fascinating book on the pair — The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Srickling and the MGM Publicity Machine — puts it in context. Stars such as Clark Gable and Greta Garbo were worth untold millions to MGM, and the loss of such an asset could easily doom the studio.

If fans knew that Gable fathered an illegitimate child or ran over and killed a pedestrian with his car (in the fall of 1933, according to legend), if Wallace Beery was known as a murderer, if Garbo was known to be an active bisexual, the results would have been disastrous. So MGM had to keep the secrets. Make the arrangements. “Fix” things….Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling were involved in some of the most spectacular cover-ups in the history of MGM, Hollywood and the movies.

According to Fleming, the Mannix-Strickling team was behind cover ups relating to the following:

— Gables’s fathering an out-of-wedlock child (a girl) by Loretta Young. (For more on this topic, see our two blogs on the subject, Jan. 4, 2012’s DID LORETTA YOUNG HAVE ANILLEGITIMATE CHILD? and Who Really Was Judy Lewis’ Father? published the following day)

— Van Johnson’s arranged Mexico marriage to actor Kennan Wynn’s ex-wife when rumors about Johnson’s homosexuality became too strong for Mayer to bear. (See our several blogs on this subject by entering Johnson’s name in our “type your search” box on the upper right.)

— The toll illegal drug use took on Judy Garland. When Mannix learned a female drug dealer associated with gangster Lucky Luciano was indeed selling drugs to Garland (in the 1940’s), according to Fleming, Mannix had another gangster threaten the drug dealer with being tossed from the highest point of a huge, New Jersey amusement park Ferris wheel both happened to be riding at the time. The dealer immediately disappeared from the MGM lot.

— The details surrounding the suicide of Mexican spitfire Lupe Veldez, one of the few times that the Mannix-Strickling team didn’t pull off a complete cover up. They had more success with burying the details of her sex life. (Actor Charles Bickford once described Lupe as a “sex-driven, drug-crazed wreck.”) Mannix and Strickling arranged to have Veldez’ final boyfriend, actor-playboy Harald Ramond, who impregnated her, banned from every Hollywood studio.

Mannix’s second wife, a former Ziegfeld Follies actress-dancer, embarked (supposedly with his blessing; he had plenty of affairs of his own) on an illicit romance with George Reeves, the original TV Superman of the early Fifties.

Mannix was for some time (and perhaps still) suspected of having Reeves’ murdered. The situation is entertainingly covered in the 2006 movie, Hollywoodland, costarring BenAffleck as Reeves and DianeLane as Mrs. Mannix.

Strickland was far less colorful in both his professional and personal life. A true-blue company man, he brilliantly built up MGM’s publicity operation to be Hollywood’s best. The techniques he pioneered are still in use today.

Mannix and Strickling — quite a duo. They are pictured below with Clark Gable, after his wife Carole Lombard’s plane had crashed and the received word that there were no survivors.

Yet these three, (whose “A” films could be counted on the fingers of one hand) share something in common with big stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland and Academy Award winners such as Joan Crawford and Joan Fontaine.

What is it?

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers here to talk about how a few actresses gained a bit of movie immortality because — they had the good fortune to be cast opposite a certain leading man. The question is, who is that man?

By now many of you may have guessed what distinguishes the three women mentioned above from other lesser-knowns. They all danced on screen with the incomparable Fred Astaire.

Crawford was Fred’s first dancing partner. That was at MGM. Then he went over to RKO, was teamed with Ginger Rogers and the rest, as the cliche goes, was history. After one pairing with Fontaine (not a great dancer) at RKO Fred left the studio to freelance.

Partners came and went from then on. Paulette Goddard. Eleanor Powell. Two films with Rita Hayworth.

Then Paramount teamed Astaire with Bing Crosby, and since the men were the stars of 1942’s Holiday Inn, the studio could cast females who weren’t necessarily name above the title types. Thus Marjorie Reynolds and Virginia Dale got their chances to dance with the master.

Reynolds, a brunette who’d gone blonde, was in our opinion just serviceable in her part, but Dale was as good as any of Astaire’s previous partners. However, after this film both actress-dancers returned to B films and faded from public view — although Reynolds had a brief comeback on TV as the wife on the popular Fifties situation comedy, The Life of Riley, starring William Bendix as the bumbling Chester Riley.

Lucille Bremer was an accomplished dancer under contract to MGM. She was a former Radio City Hall Rockette who had been on Broadway, and after signing with the studio was given a big push. She was Judy Garland’s older sister in Meet Me in St.Louis, then given a starring part opposite Astaire in Yolanda and the Thief, released in 1945.

She danced with him again in two sequences for The Ziegfeld Follies (1946). But then, after Till the Clouds Roll By, she seemed to fall out of favor with Mayer and producer Arthur Freed.

Rumor had it that she was Freed’s mistress. In any event it was deemed that she hadn’t scored with the public. Her career languished. Whether it was the studio’s, or Bremer’s decision, her contract wasn’t renewed. She starred in a few non dancing roles, then retired.

One indie film in which she appears is a favorite of Joe’s. It’s Ruthless, (1948), produced and released by Eagle Lion, and features all those “stars” that had been cultivated at other studios —Zachary Scott, Louis Hayward, Diana Lynn, Sydney Greenstreet, Martha Vickers and Bremer. Raymond Burr is in it too, but he didn’t receive name above the title billing as did the others. See it, it’s fun.

(While you’re at it, why not check out the same year’s Behind Locked Doors, another interesting noir title starring Bremer as the daughter of a mysterious judge who disappears.)

Louis B. Mayer, born to an immigrant Russian Jewish family as Laza Meir, was Hollywood royalty for nearly five decades.

An aggressive businessman, who supposedly resorted to blackmail as a means to underpay Clark Gable, he ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as the world’s most successful movie studio.

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, here today to welcome back our good pal and contributor, Hy Hollinger, who as a longtime Variety correspondent was there when Louis B. lost his job, his status, everything.

Mayer had come from harsh beginnings, working in youth in his father’s New England scrap metal business while slowly establishing himself as a regional exhibitor, then as a local movie distributor in Massachusetts.

His Hollywood relocation in 1918 brought the formation of his own production company (Mayer Pictures) which was absorbed into Metro-Goldwyn by Marcus Lowe, owner of the Loew’s theater chain. (With Loew’s permission, Louis B. later added his surname to the studio trademark.)

As the studio boss, Mayer’s production philosophy was uncomplicated and always connected to the box office dollar. I want to give the public entertainment, and thank God, it pays off, he said. Clean, American entertainment…Yes! Sentiment is the heart of America. I like Grandma Moses. I have her paintings in every room of my house. I’m not ashamed of it. This is America …Her pictures are life.

He had little regard for movie reviewers. As soon as it says the picture was made in Italy, some eighty-dollar-a-week critic writes a big rave review calling it art…I know what the audience wants. Andy Hardy. Sentimentality. What’s wrong with it? Love! Good old fashioned romance!

Mayer was rarely sentimental in negotiations with actors under MGM contract. He was avuncular to some (Kathryn Hepburn), protective to others (Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien, pictured with our man above) and a hard-ass to most. In his 1965 memoir (Bulls, Balls, Bicycles and Actors), Charles Bickford referred to him as a “venomous little junk dealer.”

After Mayer dressed him down over some infraction during the making of the 1930 thriller The Sea Bat, Bickford concluded:

Of all the sons-of-bitches I have ever met, this son-of-a-bitch is the most despicable son-of-a-bitch of them all. (Their meeting concluded with Mayer calling the actor a lousy red-headed mick son of a bitch and Bickford responding, to hell with you — you posturing little ignoramus.

By the late Forties, MGM had fallen on harder times, and Mayer paid a price. He was fired in 1951 by (parent company) Loew’s boss and arch-enemy Nicholas Schenck. Production exec DoreSchary, two decades younger than Mayer and a firm believer in “message” movies of dubious box office prospects, was elevated to replace him. (After shuttling Garland out of MGM, Schary lasted five years at the helm.)

MGM was further rattled in the late Fifties when a Canadian industrialist and a big Loew’s stockholder started to throw his weight around parent company headquarters in New York.

Our man Hy was then covering the company closely for Variety, and noted in the April 3, 1957 edition of Variety that Joseph Tomlinson, the Canadian millionaire who launched the executive changes at (MGM parent) Loew’s, said he still favored the return of Louis B. Mayer to the company

When Tomlinson threatened to start a proxy fight against Loews, he listed as one of his proposals the return of Mayer as studio chief.

The proposal got nowhere. I recall standing outside the board room of MGM in the Loew’s State building on Broadway waiting for the announcement of a new president after a lengthy, brutal proxy fight, Hy recently told us.

Standing with us (Hy and reporters from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times) was the legendary movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, who was waiting for the call to once again lead MGM. That call never came.

Hy was unimpressed by the former MGM titan: What I recall is this arrogant s.o.b. standing meekly with hat in hand waiting to get his job back.

Hello, everybody. Joe Morella and Frank Segers, your classic movie guys, wondering today about a certain tradition of actor loyalty, especially big stars using their clout to protect younger actors. Does it still exist in Hollywood’s cutthroat culture of today?

We were able to come up with two indisputable instances of exemplary behavior in this regard from two very different movie personalities. Both stuck their necks out, and battled studio front offices on another’s behalf. Both won their loyalty battles. Ironically, the studios benefited from the movies that resulted.

We’ll cover the first of these good Samaritans today.

Van Johnson’s career breakthrough came in 1943 in Victor Fleming’s romantic fantasy A Guy Named Joe. Johnson plays a young serviceman adopted by the ghost of a grizzled fighter pilot (Spencer Tracy), who was killed in a crash but returns to earth to advise the younger man in the wooing of Tracy’s former girlfriend (Irene Dunne). Thanks to this movie, Johnson, then 26, was about to be propelled from promising-MGM-talent status to stardom.

The movie almost didn’t get made with Johnson, however. In March 31, 1943, the actor was driving to a studio screening with friends – said to be fellow actor Keenan Wynn and his wife, Evie. At a Culver City intersection a car came barreling through a red light and slammed into the side of Johnson’s convertible. The force of the impact rolled the vehicle on its side.

Johnson was thrown from the car, sustaining a fractured skull, multiple facial cuts, a severed artery in his neck and bone fragments piercing his brain. At the hospital, Johnson overheard a doctor say, “He’ll never work in pictures again, even if he does live.”

Because Johnson was expected to perform in just about every scene in A Guy Named Joe, director Fleming shut down the picture indefinitely in late April. MGM brass then set about choosing the young actor’s replacement so that production could quickly crank back up.

That was when the 43-year-old Tracy stepped forward. The senior actor took a meeting with MGM boss Louis B. Mayer.Let’s wait for Van, urged Tracy.

Recalled veteran studio publicist Eddie Lawrence (as quoted in author James Curtis’ massive biography of Tracy): Now that was really something to do because that was a (matter) of time commitments…They stopped the picture because of Spence. For Van Johnson, they wouldn’t stop the picture. Spencer had to put his weight in there because they wouldn’t have done it otherwise.

Tracy visited the younger actor often at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, repeatedly assuring him that his A Guy Named Joe role was safe. “That gave me a goal, it gave me sunlight at the end of the tunnel,” Johnson later recalled.

Yes, there is a flip side of “no good deed goes unpunished.” Johnson recovered faster than anyone expected, and the movie resumed production in July 1943, wrapping the following September. When it A Guy Named Joe was theatrically released, it was an instant hit — the highest grossing movie Tracy had ever made to that point.